The Base Mage tree

Classes Mage
1

Incantation of swifness : early talent node giving movement to a other very deep talent node ? Why ?
Reduplication : completely useless talent why even keep that ?
Reabsortion : also useless…
Incanter’s Flow : provide mobility over Dps but its too much undertuned
The infamus Rune of Power : Almost unusable in M+ due to overload of ability zone targeting you
Alter Time : Kinda hard to use in pve … use it after you got hit ? lead only to hp loss
Mass polymoph : its a pvp talent why is it on pve panel ?
Slow : ??? no dmg … no use at all since you have free slow on other ability …
Mass Slow : Mass Useless
Improved frost nova : useless
Tome of Rhonin and Tome of Antonidas : Dps upgrade but fully passive and boring
Volatile Detonation : usefull in pvp but in pve make the spell unsuable to cancel caster and not be a total troll
Energized Barriers : once again a pvp talent in the pve section …
Frigid Winds : Does not work on all spell with slow … deceptive little use
Accumulative Shielding : Our shield ether pop instanly or last the full Cd … leading to useless talent node
Dragon’s Breath : why is this not in the fire base spec ?
Meteor : Why is the dmg split for Aoe ?

So half the base mage spec is literaly doing nothing … Mage Dev plz explain ?
The 3 mage spec tree could use some tuning …

2

I have thousands of critiques about this post, but I support a complete mage talent tree revamp, so i’ll remain quiet lol

5 Likes
3

plz do critic … if mage stay silent nothing will change

1 Like
4

Gives you 80% movement speed to the baseline Invisibility spell. Tooltip is buggy. Great talent

Both of these mirror image talents are very bad.

Personally enjoy this choice node/both abilities. Incanter’s could use a buff. Many topics on these two so I won’t go into it.

Incredibly high skill cap ability in pve and pvp. Third shimmer charge. Amazing talent.

Great idea, poor implementation. Hasn’t found a use case and likely won’t for a while. Obvious pve uses if it were ranged and you give it some thought, poor talent for now.

Iconic spell that I’m happy is accessible by all specs. Mass slow is pretty iffy, but a cool addition I’d say.

Have specced into this many times for certain dungeons/M+ affixes (think spiteful).

Great for repositioning enemies. Used to use it a lot in heroic dathea for the add platforms. Great for sanguine weeks. Finds MANY uses and will continue to find more (halls of valor, shadowmoon burial grounds, could even use it in CoS)

Completely removes the heal absorb that diurna gives out. Also great for rasz giant circles? (correct me if I’m wrong on this, we do already have a decently easy time with them though but I DO want to try this now) ALSO clears all stacks of Sennarth’s webbed debuff. Happy to have this talent, many uses to be discovered as the xpac goes on.

Bummed that this is a mandatory talent.

Often times a consideration, but usually a skip/dump talent. Shield popping instantly is hyperbole, but I should probably be taking this more often than I do (hard to get points into it with it being so far down the tree)

So that every spec can have access to it? Absolutely love seeing this in the class tree.

So they could tune it for ST use cases, but alas this ability needs a big buff.

3 Likes
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Ok, but im gonna be brief to not take too much time.

Incantation: Nice speed boost to use everywhere when you’re out of blinks or to scape and reset a pack or a mob that is chasing you, nice talent, but it should be only one point, 2 is too much.

Rune of Power: I would not consider it unusable, its completely fine to use if you know where to stand, if you use ice floes, shimmer or alter time and if you predict mobs and bosses mechanics. I dont like it either, but saying its almost unusable is kinda too much.

Improved Frost Nova: Its useful in pvp and to control mobs in tons of dungeons. Remember the tree is also used in PVP and the pvp talents are limited. We see those more pvp oriented talents over all classes trees

Alter Time: I would never say that about Alter Time, its one of the best defensives in the game, has thousands of uses, but like rune of power, you need to play the game to understand where its useful, cause it IS USEFUL.

Energized Barriers: AMAZING talent for Court of Stars (at first boss it takes out the jump debuff) and Azure Vault (it takes out the slow debuff from last boss)

Frigid Winds: Affects all frost spells, arcane barrage slow, flamestrike slow and blast wave slow. Straight up good talent

Dragon’s Breath: Arcane and Frost were asking for this like ages ago, its the only way to stun mobs and interrupt red casts only fire used to have. Its an amazing adition.

The rest i agree

3 Likes
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I’m tellin you this is one of the most slept on talents in the game lol. Just learned this, ty!

2 Likes
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I love it, and i’m always testing everywhere lol

2 Likes
8

About your mass poly critique, i would say it should be instant and NOT HEAL mobs, its done, the talent becomes amazing.

Or take out the “enter in combat” from poly as a whole, give it 40y cast from afar and we have a perfect skip skill

2 Likes
9

Instant and keep it melee, or ranged with a cast time. Melee with a 2 second cast time is just not usable for pack skipping. Healing mobs makes it poor for, I don’t know, attempting to keep a pull going after the rest of your group wipes in M+? That’d be a pretty sweet use case.

Making you enter combat means that you’re guaranteed to always use greater invis/regular invis in conjunction which is bad design I think? (making a utility spell only work if you burn a second utility spell)

Pre-casting Mass Poly → Shimmer into the pack of mobs is just way too dangerous to be used at a consistent, competitive level (you’d get instantly deleted in anything above a +10 unless you perfectly time the shimmer). BUT, if properly implemented this spell could finally give the game a much needed alternative “shroud of concealment” in a way

2 Likes
10

Exactly, every aspect of it kills the utility it could have. I’m mad about this talent since i’ve heard about the tooltip. The idea could be SOOOOO GOOD

2 Likes
11

thanks for the comment i learned a bit

1 Like
12

Healing makes it poor for aoe interrupt, cause the healing is SO FAST even with everyone hitting the mobs it still ticks and heals at least 30% lol

2 Likes
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I will admit that outside of double lust, our tree is pretty meh compared to other classes.

Rogues, for instance, get a ton of cool damage options from their general tree

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14

I don’t know how anyone can consider [Improved Frost Nova] and [Accumulative Shielding] anywhere near useful. [Improved Frost Nova] in particular feels like an insult getting [Frost Nova] baseline nerfed to have those 2 seconds put into the talent tree but they are not worth the talent point investment.

1 Like
15

imagine puting point in Slow and Mass Slow !

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Whoa totally missed that tidbit about Energized Barriers…that is awesome, nice find.

Agree on a chunk of the talents being useless and/or uninspired though. Mass poly is one of the only new toys we got and it’s a complete meme.

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Yeah, [Energized Barriers] is pretty good. Every debuff that does something + a snare can be removed with it, like Arcane Lockdown from the first boss in CoS, the web debuff on Sennarth, the one on Diurna like mentioned by someone else here, etc.

It’s situational but has some great uses, like something in a talent tree should be. A pity a lot of other choices are pretty much useless in all forms of content.

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It should only be a single point talent. There’s no cost efficient alternative to remove curse going to alter time and incantation would be far from overpowered costing one point.

Yep it bad. Doesn’t restore enough time and MI doesn’t really do anything ever since its damage was removed at the start of shadowlands.

Agreed. The heal is effected by dampening, and if you’re not below 80 when you pop mi, you are wasting the healing because MIs INSTANTLY die now-a-days.

Its never going to be equal to rune of power. IF is just a bad talent and like rune is bad for the mage trees.

Rune isn’t even like exciting. Its 40% bonus damage and that should be huge but because mage damage is balanced around 40% bonus damage its like just our normal damage.

You use it to either cheese positioning or use it when there’s big aoe damage out or use it to reset a charge of blink.

There are no pve trees. They are the mage trees and they exist for pvpers and pvers alike. PvP has extra talents to help the pvp devs balance classes for Pvp but that doesn’t make the trees pve trees lol.

Mass poly is alright in pve it can be used to do skips but its just not that good.

Slow is great in pvp.

Its not great but its an alright choice when facing a melee cleave but there are better talents too.

Improved frost nova is needed to counteract relentless from trinkets and infurious.

All trees have talents like these. They could be worse.

Its dope in m+

Its incredibly useful in pve and the mage talents are not the pve tree.

Yea it does lol.

Yeap its a bad talent AND a boring talent.

Cus arcane and frost need some kind of hard CC option

Meteor has always worked that way. Its a single target move, not an aoe one.

1 Like
20

A separate button for Temporal Warp would also be very much appreciated.

Rune of power has been debated endlessly and I pray for its painful demise.

Ice Ward isn’t bad for Spiteful weeks, but really shouldn’t be gating Shifting Power.

Wish I were better at using Alter Time/Master of Time effectively, but using it just for the extra blink isn’t awful.

Love it if Meteor got replaced with an upgraded range on DB with the 25s cooldown. Even then, no idea how I’d give up SP/Temporal Warp…

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I see comments like this all the time but the reasoning is completely flawed. All this means is that every single tree needs a rework because it’s objectively poor design to waste talent nodes on completely passive DPS boosts that don’t interact in any way with your rotation.

I genuinely don’t understand why so many players have seemingly given up on asking for meaningful changes and calling out Blizzard when they’re so obviously wrong. The talent tree revamp was rushed, bugged, and utterly underwhelming. There is no way they didn’t know it at the time and that’s bad enough but they need to constantly be reminded that we also know it’s crap and demand better.

Nothing is ever going to change if we don’t ask for it.